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Bible Dictionaries
Serpent, Brazen
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
or SERPENT, BRAZEN . Numbers 21:4-9 relates that Moses was commanded by God to make a serpent of brass (or rather, of bronze) and to set it upon a standard (RV [Note: Revised Version.] ), that those who had been bitten by the serpents might look on it and be healed. This was in harmony with a wide-spread belief that the image of a hurtful thing drives the evil away. In the absence of a direct statement we cannot say whether it was Jahweh who was worshipped under the form of the bronze serpent of 2 Kings 18:4 the Nehushtan , or piece of bronze, as it was called. Some think it represented the Celestial Dragon, others the spirit of an ancestor, others a chthonic deity: Robertson Smith believed that it was the totem of David’s house. There are traces of serpent-worship in Israel ( 1 Kings 1:9 Zoheleth = ‘snake’; Nehemiah 2:13 ). The two points of comparison present to our Lord’s mind in John 3:14 are (1) the lifting up of the serpent on the pole and Himself on the Cross, and (2) the voluntary looking of the Hebrews to the serpent for the verb employed means more than simply seeing and the faith of believers (see Sir 16:5-7 ).
J. Taylor.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Serpent, Brazen'. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdb/s/serpent-brazen.html. 1909.
